newsbobber blog

Top 100 Minnesota blogs ... updated list

I've added a bunch of blogs to the Minnesota Blog Directory, which now features entries on more than 940 sites. I've also updated popularity data for most of the blogs and recalculated the Newsbobber score for every site. So there's an updated list of Minnesota's Top 100 blogs.

The list has changed quite a bit since I first created it last summer. Some of top blogs weren't in the directory when the initial list came out. Other top-scoring sites have been in the directory for months, but until recently did not have accurate or updated popularity data. Once I updated the data and recalculated the scores, those blogs shot up in the rankings. That explains why some blogs (talking to you, Bob Collins) have fallen in the rankings, even though their score stayed the same or even increased.

Some caveats: The Newsbobber score aims to rank blogs by popularity, not quality. The score is based on four metrics -- inlinks, Google Reader subscribers, Google PageRank and a ranking from the feed-filtering service PostRank. For each metric, a blog gets 0 to 10 points, depending on its performance against all the other blogs in the directory. A blog's overall score is the average of its points in each category. The system is far from perfect, but it does a decent job measuring any given blog's popularity vs. the other blogs in the directory.

Also, I'm fairly liberal when it comes to including blogs in the directory. Blogs based in Minnesota get in ... even those that aren't really about Minnesota. I've also included blogs based outside the state that feature a lot of Minnesota-related content.

One blog that cracked the Top 10 -- Rex Sorgatz's Fimoculous -- is really on the bubble for me. He worked in Minnesota for several years, helping found MNSpeak and working at Internet Broadcasting (my former employer). A lot of people here know him. But he now lives in New York City and his site has little to do with Minnesota. Should Fimoculous be included in a Minnesota blog directory?

If you want to see how various blogs stack up in various categories, check out the directory main page and click the topic tabs. Blogs are listed by topic, with top-scoring sites appearing at the top.

Also, play around with the search function. You can search for blogs by title, author or topic. General search terms like "baseball" or "real estate" might bring up blogs you've never seen before.

Now that I've got the directory listings updated, I may begin tracking how the ranking and scores change over time. It would be cool to see how any given blog's rank and score have gone up or down during the past month or year.

See any errors in the directory? Outdated info? Know of blogs that should be included? Have any other feedback? Comment below or better yet, use the directory feedback form.

I owe a hat tip to MNHeadhunter at TwinCitiesBlogs. Paul DeBettignies has done a great job pulling together lists of Twin Cities blogs ... and he was tracking a bunch of sites that were not in the Newsbobber directory.

Newsbobber & MPR

Newsbobber is headed to Minnesota Public Radio. I've taken a job with MPR and Newsbobber is part of the deal.

So Newsbobber will not survive in its current form. Instead, elements of Newsbobber -- and certainly some of the ideas behind it -- will become part of MPR's Minnesota Today, a new web venture and content-sharing project.

My job will be to help create, launch and run Minnesota Today. I'll be focused on the web side of the project, trying to build a robust and engaging hub for Minnesota news, culture and buzz.

Minnesota Today also includes a plan to share content among MPR and other media outlets, including newspapers. MPR hired David Cazares, a veteran newspaper journalist most recently with the South Florida Sun Sentinel, to lead that part of the project.

I get started Nov. 9 at MPR. The goal is to launch Minnesota Today by Jan. 1.

Newsbobber has been a great learning experience. When I started building it, I knew next to nothing about web design and absolutely nothing about coding. I just had a strong belief that a locally curated Minnesota news site was a good idea. Now that Newsbobber has been up and running for awhile, I'm even more sold on the value of pulling together major media, independent sources, blogs, Twitter and whatever else is out there.

Aggregating the news is nothing new, of course, and plenty of players are doing it on a large scale ... and bringing it down to a local level. But I don't believe the automated national aggregators that try to serve a local audience have truly nailed it. They do a good job serving latest headlines from major media outlets, but largely ignore indy media and blogs. They also have trouble identifying quirky local stories or sometimes even the biggest story of the day. (Compare the Twin Cities efforts of Outside.In, Topix, Yahoo and Google). The problem for the national players of course is that adding a human touch to every market (editors who pick top stories, for example) would shatter the business model. Human curation is expensive and doesn't scale easily.

But it's coming. Examiner.com features locally produced content, news headlines and events. Huffington Post and ESPN are moving into the local space, and in fact have joined forces in Chicago to create a mix of news, sports, blogs and chat that aims to snare a sizable share of the metro market. UPDATE 10/29: Another local effort to watch will be Allbritton's plans for a Washington DC local site that will merge two TV station sites and employ about 50 journalists and web producers.

The market for a Minnesota news hub remains fairly open, though some intriguing efforts are getting underway. BringMeTheNews is a Twin Cities news site that combines news aggregation and original content. WCCO aims to launch The Wire, a service that aims to combine reader input and staff reporting in a free-flowing river of news and information.

It's an exciting and competitive time. I'm now biased, of course, but I think MPR is making a smart play with Minnesota Today. I'm eager to get started.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter

Not long after I started building Newsbobber, I knew I would have to tackle Twitter someday. My feeling is that any aggregator site aiming to become a go-to source for news, information, buzz and entertainment must have a Twitter component.

That's more true today than it was even a year ago, when launching a Minnesota news aggregator was just a gleam in my eye. The fact is that anyone who wants to be truly plugged into a city's news, politics and civic life needs to know what's happening on Twitter.

In the past few weeks I finally tackled Twitter. My goal has not been to replace anyone's Twitter app of choice, but rather to help filter and organize Minnesota-related tweets -- for Twitter veterans and newbies alike. One model I used for inspiration was Muck Rack, which streams tweets from national media personalities. I like the idea of giving people a place to monitor the chatter from notable people in certain fields or professions. If you've been offline for a bit, or if you haven't even created a Twitter profile, you can duck in to quickly catch up and see what's going on.

So far, I've built three Twitter streams, including politics, news media and social media. Each stream features a day's worth of tweets from people in those fields.

Another feature are the Twitter bios, which let you find out who some of the tweeters are. You can sort the Twitter users by name, number of followers and number of times they've tweeted.

At this point, I'm limiting the streams to Twitter users who have a proven track record in their field. In politics, that means elected officials, political reporters, lobbyists, party hacks and activists, for example. I know I've created a gate-keeping function that runs counter to some of the openness of Twitter and the Web overall. But I figure that many users already get the anything-goes streams via their own Twitter page or application. The whole point of the Newsbobber streams is to organize tweets into groups that have some meaning and value.

Some people may say that hashtags already accomplish what I'm trying to do. That's true, up to a point. In fact, I'm streaming some Minnesota politics hashtags on my politics page. But while hashtags are a valuable tool for organizing tweets, they also are susceptible to abuse, spammers and fools. So by limiting entry to my streams, I'm keeping the noise to a minimum.

I'm also committed to an open-door policy. If someone pings me and wants to be included in one of the streams, great. Just show that you're involved in the pertinent profession and you're in.

A recently launched site called Twin Cities Twitter takes a different approach. The guys behind that site (and its related sites) have done a good job in creating a sort of Twitter town hall for the Twin Cities. It appears they're accepting most comers. My only knock is that frequent tweeters and commercial-type users tend to dominate the stream.

The Newsbobber Twitter streams are an initial stab at aggregating Twitter. My goal is to create a "Login in with Twitter" feature that will let you tweet, retweet, follow and send direct messages without having to leave Newsbobber.

A quick technical note of thanks to Matt Williams and Arc90. Matt, who I've never met, created a great client to interact with Twitter's API in PHP. Arc90 shared its code for free with the world and that's a wonderful thing.

Minnesota Blog Rankings

I've built a system to rank blogs and the first version is up and running. The rankings are a work in progress, but the initial list of top blogs is interesting for sure.

As far as I can tell, no one else is ranking Minnesota blogs like this. So far, I'm using four metrics: Google PageRank, inbound links measured by Yahoo, Google Reader subscribers and blog rankings from PostRank.

I've built an algorithm that mashes those four metrics into a score from 1 to 10. I'm sure I'll be tweaking (or overhauling, I suppose) the ranking system as I see how it performs and get feedback.

During construction, I turned to the AdAge Power150 rankings for ideas and inspiration. The Power150, which ranks marketing and advertising blogs, is far more polished than the Newsbobber system, but I'm getting there.

One of the cool things the Newbobber system lets me do is create feeds from top blogs by topic. On the Newsbobber front page, you can see a box that streams latest posts from the top news, sports and political blogs. So far I'm using the top 10 ranking blogs in each category, but I can change that number easily to expand the pool. What I like about this module is that it's fully automated, so that as the Newsbobber rankings change, the mix of blogs feeding into the box changes, too.

A huge leap for the ranking system will come when I build a system for user voting. Then I can have a "fan vote" that stands alone as a pure popularity contest while also folding into the overall scoring system. This is a Phase II plan that will require me to really expand my programming abilities (sessions, cookies, usernames, passwords, complex database management, styling issues, user interface, etc.).

Newsbobber's Minnesota Blog Directory

My seed of an idea for an "annotated blogroll" has blossomed into the Minnesota Blog Directory.

The impetus was necessity. When I first started building Newsbobber, I spent a lot of time looking for good Minnesota blogs. I did what I suspect a lot of people do: I perused the blogrolls of bloggers I liked.

I also searched for directories or lists of Minnesota blogs. Initially, the best list I could find was one maintained by City Pages. That list proved daunting and somewhat frustrating. There are hundreds of blogs listed, but the only information provided is the blog's title. That's not much to go on. Plus, many of the links were dead.

Later I discovered the BlogNetNews Minnesota site. This is a solid directory, listing latest posts and popularity data for each blog. But it's limited to political blogs.

Minnesota.com has been building a Minnesota blog directory. It offers a feature of sorting blogs by city. It also lets users see latest posts and the author's blog description.

The Newsbobber directory does more than any other directory I've found. Visitors can peruse blogs by title or topic. They can search for blogs by keyword, author or city. Soon they'll be able to sort blogs by popularity. So if a user wants to find the "best" or "most engaging" blogs in Minnesota, the Newsbobber Minnesota Blog Directory will be the place.

One key feature of the directory is the "detail page" for each blog. The page provides the author's description, latest posts, best recent posts (determined by a web filtering and ranking service called PostRank), latest comments, popularity data, a subscribe button, the author's Twitter feed and links to related sites. For the top Minnesota blogs, I'm planning to add a description written by Newsbobber.

My goal all along has been to build a tool that helps people discover and explore Minnesota blogs. There are many interesting, funny, compelling, weird and informative blogs out there. I'm sure many writers will win a wider audience once it become easier for everyone to find them.

So far, the directory lists about 600 blogs. I've partnered with my work colleague Justin Piehowski, who writes the Minnesota Blog Cabin column for MinnPost, to build the list of blogs.

The directory is a work in progress. We're in the process of categorizing, describing and tagging each blog. But take a peek. I hope you find the directory useful and engaging.

Whistle while you work

So I'm still building Newsbobber ... and I'm making progress on many fronts. I'm still doing most of work during hours I should be sleeping. Lately I've shifted from staying up way too late to getting up way too early.

Most of the work has been behind the scenes. I'm planning to do more with Twitter. I've already created Twitter streaming boxes on several pages, pairing tweets from media outlets and journalists with headlines from their organization. So I've spent a fair amount of time exploring ways to display Twitter on my site. I may write a more detailed Twitter post later, but for now I'll just say that I'm in deep. Example: I'm trying to integrate a PHP-based code that will query the Twitter REST API and display the data in a cool way. So there.

Another big project is my Newsbobber database. I resisted creating a database, but one of the ideas I'm executing cries out for one. So I pored through a few MySQL tutorials and took the plunge. Now my database is built and I'm ready to begin entering data. I'm using basic HTML forms and PHP to input and revise data. So far, my web host (Dreamhost) has performed admirably. Dreamhost made it easy to set up my online access to phpMyAdmin, which is a graphical interface for MySQL databases.

I've bled past my goal of launching in a beta-like way in May. I'm still several weeks away from having something that's ready for Twin Cities prime time. But that's OK. I'm not in a huge rush and I'm aiming to have several features in place that will be worth talking about and sharing.

Early Newsbobber feedback

I've started sharing the Newsbobber URL with friends and colleagues. So I'd guess about 15 people have seen the site so far. Lifetime unique visitors now in the double digits!

The feedback has been generally positive and very helpful. I'd say overall the handful of people who've seen Newsbobber like the concept and see some value. Also, there have been favorable initial impressions of the site's clean design. So that's encouraging.

The Twitter boxes on the front page have a couple of favorable votes that came with suggestions to move those higher on the page. Another person doesn't much care for Twitter and didn't see a lot of value in that "noise."

One friend had a good line about the basic structure and purpose of Newsbobber: "It's like Netvibes without the work." That's accurate in that I'm really trying to appeal to people who spend a fair amount of time online and care about Twin Cities news, but who are not RSS junkies. The Netvibes line was funny because I actually put together a conceptual model of Newsbobber on Netvibes, just to play around with the idea of "news boxes."

My front page Blog Box also needs work and that's evident in some of the comments. I need a better way to draw in the visitors and highlight the blog posts. The blogs items look exactly like news items, so they get lost. So I'm aiming to re-do that section, making the blog names more prominent and giving the visitor an overview of the blog (perhaps with a hover effect that brings up a short description of the blog).

Making progress on Newsbobber

I've been plugging away on Newsbobber for several weeks now. Mostly I work in the early morning and at night after the kids go to bed. I probably have invested 100 hours or more into the project.

I've shared the URL with family and few friends, just to get some initial feedback. Soon I'll be reaching out to a wider circle of friends and professional colleagues. I suppose I'm getting close to "Newsbobber Beta." Of course, the URL (and this blog) are live, so if you happen upon the site or this blog, you're getting a sneak peak at a brand-new Twin Cities news/blog/social-media aggregation site.